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While 20th Century Fox has a panel scheduled at San Diego Comic-Con this Saturday, the studio has yet to reveal what they'll be promoting that day in the convention center's main auditorium, Hall H. But if you're in the area of the convention center near the Hard Rock Hotel, you'll see that Fox has an exhibit set up outside that features some viral marketing for their upcoming X-Men sequel, X-Men: Days of Future Past.

The exhibit is a booth for Trask Industries, creator of The Sentinels, the massive robotic mutant hunters and deadly foes of the X-Men. On display was Bolivar Trask's "crowning achievement," the original Sentinel Mark I production model. Around the booth were propaganda posters decrying that mutants as the enemy and showing off the Sentinel army as the way to fight the "mutant threat."

You can see photos of the Sentinel head, along with the posters as well as the Trask Industries flyer given out at the exhibit [...]

Rolling Stone has unveiled its next cover, featuring a dreamy photo of Boston bombing suspect Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, and many people have erupted in outrage. Some critics say the image depicts Tsarnaev as a kind of celebrity; others believe it turns him into a martyr. Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick called the cover “out of taste,” while CVS has banned the issue “out of respect for the victims of the attack and their loved ones.” A smaller chain of New England stores is also boycotting the magazine for “glorify[ing] evil actions.” Never mind that the picture itself once appeared on the front page of the New York Times; when Rolling Stone uses it, they’re “tasteless,”“trashy,” and “exploitative.”

As the Washington Post’s Erik Wemple points out, the image is exploitative—but it isn’t just exploitative: It’s also smart, unnerving journalism. By depicting a terrorist as sweet and handsome rather than ugly and terrifying, Rolling Stone has subverted our expectations and hinted at a larger truth. The cover presents a stark contrast with our usual image of terrorists. It asks, “What did we expect to see in Tsarnaev? What did we hope to see?” The answer, most likely, is a monster, a brutish dolt with outward manifestations of evil. What we get instead, however, is the most alarming sight of all: a boy who looks like someone we might know.

Judging from the article itself, the image is disconcertingly apt. The story, a two-month investigative report by Janet Reitman, tracks Tsarnaev’s tragic, dangerous path from a well-liked student to a monster, focusing on the increasing influence of radical Islam. (The headline on the cover suggests as much; those immediately outraged by the picture might do well to read the accompanying text.)

Slovenian theorist Slavoj Zizek has gotten in trouble before for being a cheerleader for revolutionary terrorism. In the clip below, Zizek praises the revolutionary violence of the Robespierre and argues that true revolutionary must will be willing to become victim to revolutionary terror. Zizek conflates the fear of violence with a certain liberal complacency, and uses his oft-repeated phrase about liberals: They want coffee without caffeine, chocolate without sugar, etc.

Zizek has recently tried to pull a sleight of hand by stressing that “violence means other stuff too.” In his response to critics, Zizek notes that the actions of Ghandi were far more violent than Stalin because they were more disruptive to the status quo. While this can certainly be a valid interpretation of violence, this video also seems to verify that Zizek is cool with straight-up murdering people in the name of revolution.

One finds a similar, indeed, even more explicit, admiration of terroristic politics in Žižek. For Žižek, the only way to institutionalise a democratic insurrection is through revolutionary terror. Once again, terror becomes a sign of revolutionary authenticity for Žižek; violence is a signifier for a kind of ethics of the revolutionary act, of the commitment to ‘go to the end’ as he puts it, and to consolidate the revolution through a brutal suppression of its opponents.Thus, once again, Lenin, Mao and Robespierre become hallowed names for Žižek, invoked against his perennial targets the ‘liberals’, who want a ‘revolution without a revolution’, in other words a revolution without its violent consequences.

…The violence that is wielded by a revolutionary elite to consolidate power – as was the case in all the forms of Terror venerated by Žižek and Badiou, from the Jacobins to Lenin and Mao – has nothing redemptive about it; it cannot serve as a tool of liberation, and only ends up consolidating the most counterrevolutionary element of all, the state itself….We should reject as outmoded the Jacobin paradigm for radical politics proposed by Žižek and Badiou. Instead, we should assert an anarchist politics and ethics against all forms of state violence; indeed, anarchism is, in my view, the only form of radical politics capable of avoiding the Terror.

Fortnightly from the 9th of April, 2013, at the Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA), London, five engaging speakers will be introducing the thought of Ludwig Feuerbach, Simon Critchley, Max Horkheimer, Alain Badiou and Wilhelm Reich. These events will span themes from sexuality to economics, idealism to ethics, covered in the author’s books in the new set of Radical Thinkers.

Set 7, released this month, is the latest addition to the series. These beautifully designed books have been described by Owen Hatherley as “a compendium of left-wing philosophical and political thought.”

The following provides a brief introduction to the thinkers and offers some related preparatory materials.

Ludwig Feuerbach (1804–1872) was a German philosopher credited by both Karl Marx and Frederick Engels as a major influence. Feuerbach initially pursued a career in the Church, enrolling to study Theology at the University of Heidelberg. However, despite his father’s opposition, he later joined the University of Berlin to study under Hegel.

Among Feuerbach’s many works is The Essence of Christianity, an essential reference point for the Young Hegelians who saw the value in Hegel’s methods but who criticized his idealism. Feuerbach’s attempt at a departure from theology towards humanism opened the way for the development of Marx and Engels’ Hegelian materialism.

Simon Critchley is Hans Jonas Professor at the New School for Social Research, and also teaches at Tilburg University and the European Graduate School. For Critchley, profound disappointment is to be found at the heart of every modern liberal democracy. He argues for an ethics of commitment capable of inspiring radical change.

Max Horkheimer (1895–1973) was a sociologist, philosopher and a founder of the ‘Frankfurt School’ of social research and is particularly famed for his work with Theodor Adorno.

Horkheimer was born in Stuttgart to a wealthy family. Pressured by his father, Horkheimer left school at sixteen to work in the family’s factory however his career was cut short in 1916 when he was drafted up for the First World War. When the war was over he enrolled at Munich University where he studied philosophy and psychology. After graduating he continued to study in Frankfurt where he met his life long collaborator and friend Theodor Adorno.

Horkheimer and Adorno’s work, from within the Frankfurt School, crossed the boundaries of academic disciplines and laid the foundations of critical theory. They sought to ask how it was that the development of rational enlightenment thinking failed to create such a rational and just society. Critique of Instrumental Reason uncovers the contradictions at the heart of the Enlightenment project and why its promises failed.

Alain Badiou teaches philosophy at the École normale supérieure and the Collège international de philosophie in Paris. Considered to be one of the most powerful voices in contemporary French philosophy, Badiou explores the ground left for politics after post-modernism. Following the thought of philosophers such as Heidegger and Foucault, whose work deconstructs the singular subject upon whose experience political action may depend, Badiou’s project has been to some extent an attempt to reappeal the post-modern and redefine the subject and the event of politics.

Following the publishing of Badiou’s The Communist Hypothesis, philosophers, including Slavoj Žižek and Toni Negri, attended The Idea of Communism, a conference responding to Badiou’s notions of fidelity and a revival in the revolutionary project.

In Ethics Badiou explodes the facile assumptions behind the recent ethical turn, showing how the prevailing ethical principles of the modern liberal democracy serve ultimately to reinforce an ideology of the status quo because they can provide no effective understanding of the concept of evil.

Wilhelm Reich (1897–1957) was an Austrian psychoanalyst who made significant contributions to psychoanalytic theory. Reich had a complex and remarkable life. Born into a farming family, his mother committed suicide and his father died of TB when Reich was 17. After fighting in the First World War, Reich eventually studied medicine in Vienna, where he lived in poverty. Aged 22 in 1919, Reich met Freud and made a small income through seeing some of Freud’s patients.

Reich developed his own methods of analysis and his thought explored the construction of character and sex. 1930 he moved with his then wife to Berlin where he joined the German Communist Party and set up clinics in working-class areas to teach sex education. After his self-published work was attacked by the Nazi Party Reich fled, living precariously in Scandinavia before taking the very last boat to leave Norway for the United States before war. In these later years in America his works pitted him against the United States Food and Drug Administration, and in 1956, many of his books, journals, and papers were incinerated under court order.

Reich had a single goal in his career: to seek relief for human suffering. The same curiosity and courage that led him to join the early pioneers of Freudian psychoanalysis and then to engage in some of the most controversial work of this century, led him also, at one period of his life, to become a radical socialist.

#11 Foucault saw Deleuze as a rival

Some may find it surprising that the author of “Anti-Oedipus’” glowing introduction kind of hated the book. While Michel Foucault put on airs of amicability towards Deleuze, he was secretly jealous of Deleuze’s popularity. A close friend of Foucault’s claimed “I got the feeling that Foucault saw Deleuze as a rival.”

The rivalry rarely manifested publicly, Deleuze and Foucault could often be seen at public protests together, and Foucault even offered Deleuze a job in his philosophy department (which Deleuze had to initially refuse due to a prior commitment). Foucault even join the ranks of Nietzsche and Spinoza when Deleuze wrote “Foucault.”

Only once did Deleuze unknowingly go too far for Foucault. Deleuze had offered to write the preface to Jacques Donzelot’s thesis on “Policing the Family.” This, by the way, is the thesis that Deleuze helped Donzelot defend when he got stage fright. When Donzelot told Foucault the news, Foucault remarked “I detest that sort of thing. I can’t stand it when old men come and put their stamp on young people’s work.”

And despite the glowing introduction Foucault wrote for “Anti-Oedipus,” he allegedly hated it. Donzelot, who was a close friend of Foucault, stated “Foucault didn’t like Anti-Oedipus and told me so quite often.”

When Foucault ventured into criticizing pyschoanalysis and Lacan in the “History of Sexuality“, Deleuze wrote to Foucault to try to reconcile their theories. But Foucault hated Deleuze’s notion of desire. Foucault told a friend “I can’t stand the word desire; even if you use it different, I can’t stop myself from thinking or feeling that desire equals lack.” But rather then starting a dialogue with Deleuze about their differences, he refused to respond to Deleuze’s letter and broke off their friendship.

It was a trying time for Foucault. The first volume of the “History of Sexuality” was not received well by Foucault’s peers. And as it turns out, it was Baudrillard’s “Forget Foucault” that caused Foucault to abandon the final two volumes of the series for 7 years.

Baudrillard’s “Forget Foucault” was the final straw, so stunning the weakened philosopher that he abandoned the entire edifice that he had planned. It was only after seven years of silence, after having thoroughly revisited its premises, that he published the second volume of his “History of Sexuality.”

Towards the end of Foucault’s life, he tried to reconcile with Deleuze but never got the chance. When Foucault fell ill, Deleuze called friends of Foucault to inquire about his conditions. An optimistic Deleuze commented “Maybe it’s nothing, Foucault will leave the hospital and come and tell us that everything is all right.” But Deleuze was wrong, Foucault would die that year in 1984.

According to Didier Eribon, one of Foucault’s most heartfelt wishes, knowing that he would not live long, was to reconcile with Deleuze. They never saw each. The fact that Daniel Defert asked Deleuze to speak at Foucault’s funeral was a sign of how much both men wanted to smooth over their differences, even beyond the seperation of death.

#12 Deleuze worked in a philosophy department headed by Foucault that lost its ability to give out diplomas

After the events of May ’68, Paris-VIII, also known as Vincennes, was created to be a refuge for radical students. A committee of 20 peoples that included Jacques Derrida and Roland Barthes set out to model Vincennes after MIT. Michel Foucault was named the head of the philosophy department. While Deleuze could not initially work at Vincennes, he later joined a staff that was comprised of Alain Badiou, Jacques Ranciere, Jean-Francois Lyotard and Judith Miller.

If you wondered what could go wrong in a department filled with radicals and communists, the answer is everything. Students tore open ceilings to see “if the police had bugged the rooms” and matters of administration were often seen as fascist coups. Department members invited friends to teach classes, many of whom would not even show up for class.

When Ranciere and Badiou decided that “not showing up” was pretty good grounds to fire these teachers, the victims immediately declared it “a Bolshevik coup and alerted Deleuze and Lyotard, who saw it as the start of a witch hunt. ‘They organized a sort of hunger strike in Deleuze’s seminar.’”

And grades? Capitalist bullshit! Judith Miller openly declared “certain collective have decided not to grade students on the basis of written workers, others have decided to give a diploma to anyone who thinks they deserve one.” If you just thought “Hey! That’s something I shouldn’t openly announce to the public”, then congratulations, you’re right. The French government swiftly declared that the Vincennes philosophy department could no longer award national diplomas.

#13 In that department, Deleuze was constantly terrorized by Alain Badiou and his troop of Maoist

It wasn’t very long after the publication of “Rhizome” that the philosophy department turned into a veritable Game of Thrones. Badiou, wary of Deleuze’s popularity, led a group of Maoists who pledged their loyalty to Badiou, whom they referred to as the “Great Helmsman.”

Badiou declared Deleuze an “enemy of the people” and penned several anti-Deleuze articles. Under the psuedonym “Georges Peyol”, Badiou penned “The Fascism of the Potato,” because if I know anything about resisting fascism, it usually involves declaring enemies of the people and creating a cult of personality around yourself.

Speaking of fascism, Badiou and his gang of merry Maoist decided to stage invasions of Deleuze’s class room.

At the height of the conflict, Badious “men” would prevent Deleuze from finishing his seminar, he would put his hat back on to his head to indicate surrender. Badiou himself would occasionally turn up at Deleuze’s seminar to interrupt him, as he admits in the book he wrote on Deleuze in 1997.

Badiou, who is still totally not a fascist, created brigades to “monitor the political content of other classes in the philosophy department.” Deleuze responded to most interventions calmly, and would avoid conflict even when “groups of up to a dozen people bent on picking a fight would show up.”

Sometimes these brigades would show up with copies of Nietzsche to ask trick questions in an effort to embarrass Deleuze. And when that didn’t work:

Often the “brigade” would end up imposing the “Peoples Rule,” commanding the student to quit Deleuze’s classroom on the pretext of a meeting in Lecture Hall 1 or a rally in support of a workers’ struggle. Deleuze reacted calmly, pretending to agree with them and retaliating with irony.

And when that also didn’t work:

Only once did [Deleuze] get angry, when he found on his desk a tract by a “death squad” advocating suicide.”

All quotes and facts are derived from the Deleuze and Guattari biography “Intersecting Lives”, unless otherwise noted.

The International Journal for Badiou Studies is an international, peer-reviewed, open-source journal dedicated to the philosophy and thought of, and surrounding, the French philosopher Alain Badiou. The editorial staff and board of the IJBS is interdisciplinary across the humanities, with scholars in fields such as Philosophy, Literature and Literary Theory, Cultural Studies, Media Theory, History, and Classics. We feel that such interdisciplinarity is crucial for understanding thought in the 21st century and its relation to the philosophy of Alain Badiou.

We’ve also reproduced the table of contents from the latest issue for your convenience below.

Alain Badiou, translator of the latest version of Plato’s Republic, is writing a screenplay called “The Life of Plato.” And he wants for its leading role none other than Brad Pitt, supported by Sean Connery as Socrates and Meryl Streep as “Mrs. Plato.”

Incredible but true: Alain Badiou wants to invade Hollywood! More precisely, the communist philosopher is writing the script for a film to its production by U.S. studios. Title: The Life of Plato. The cast: Brad Pitt Plato at different ages. For Mrs. Plato, Meryl Streep. And Socrates, the master of Plato, Sean Connery. Here the cast dreamed thinker of Being and Event. Quite honestly, at first, we thought it was a schoolboy joke post-situ diversion ultimate quest … But Alain Badiou, this is serious. He wants, in his own words, “bring Plato, emblem of universal wisdom in the contemporary temple commercial images, the propaganda machine of American life, the capital of the capitalist corruption Hollywood! ”

And while this seemed to be too awesome to be true, a little due diligence (Google) found that Badiou has referenced his plans for a Plato blockbuster featuring Brad Pitt as far back as 2009 (it’s referenced here and here).

Don’t get too excited though. Badiou has yet to actually write the English script, which he plans to do this summer. And actually making the movie? According to Perrier, Badiou is in contact with” friends in Los Angeles, in conjunction with producers.”

I don’t want to be overly skeptical, but unless Joseph McCarthy was right and Hollywood really is full of pinko-Commies (who also read French theory), I’m pretty sure the Hollywood talent needed to secure Brad Pitt does not care about Alain Badiou’s silver screen machinations. We can still dream.

The NSA whistleblower, who is currently in Moscow, has written to Rafael Correa regarding his request for political asylum

Text of a letter by Edward Snowden to the President of Ecuador, Rafael Correa. Written in Spanish; obtained and translated by the Press Association, London

There are few world leaders who would risk standing for the human rights of an individual against the most powerful government on earth, and the bravery of Ecuador and its people is an example to the world.

I must express my deep respect for your principles and sincere thanks for your government's action in considering my request for political asylum.

The government of the United States of America has built the world's largest system of surveillance. This global system affects every human life touched by technology; recording, analysing, and passing secret judgment over each member of the international public.

It is a grave violation of our universal human rights when a political system perpetuates automatic, pervasive and unwarranted spying against innocent people.

In accordance with this belief, I revealed this programme to my country and the world. While the public has cried out support of my shining a light on this secret system of injustice, the government of the United States of America responded with an extrajudicial man-hunt costing me my family, my freedom to travel and my right to live peacefully without fear of illegal aggression.

As I face this persecution, there has been silence from governments afraid of the United States government and their threats. Ecuador however, rose to stand and defend the human right to seek asylum.

The decisive action of your consul in London, Fidel Narvaez, guaranteed my rights would be protected upon departing Hong Kong – I could never have risked travel without that. Now, as a result, and through the continued support of your government, I remain free and able to publish information that serves the public interest.

No matter how many more days my life contains, I remain dedicated to the fight for justice in this unequal world. If any of those days ahead realise a contribution to the common good, the world will have the principles of Ecuador to thank.

Please accept my gratitude on behalf of your government and the people of the Republic of Ecuador, as well as my great personal admiration of your commitment to doing what is right rather than what is rewarding.

YouTube has issued its first white paper (a document designed to help constituents understand a particular issue), titled

"Gamers on Youtube: Evolving Video Consumption," and the subject is near and dear to our hearts. Google's ubiquitous video branch has quantified the impact of video games, and the statistics evidence significant growth in comparison to other content hosted by the service.

The thesis of Google's study is that video continues to grow as the meeting place between publishers and consumers. In 2012, views of game-related content doubled year-over-year, which was a faster expansion rate than YouTube's overall growth percentage in the United States.

Another key statistic reveals that as time goes on in a product life cycle, views transition from desktop before launch (teasers, trailers, developer walkthroughs) to mobile and tablet post-release (tips, "let's plays", achievement guides). More importantly for publishers, once the community gets its hands on a game, it generates almost as much traffic post-launch as the publisher drummed up pre-release.

Our TakeIt shouldn't come as a surprise that video is increasingly important to video game enthusiasts. In addition to YouTube's own growth in the sector, Twitch.tv has become an enormous success. Competitive gaming has taken off, attracting huge viewership across video outlets.

There are some elements of the white paper that can be dismissed as unsurprising. For instance, pre-launch views correlate to post-release sales. Awareness is often a leading indicator of sales performance, and high viewership clearly indicates consumer interest.

As I read the white paper, one statistic stood out. The community is responsible for nearly half of the views, clearly extending awareness and word-of-mouth long after a publisher's own PR and marketing plan has run its course. This correlates directly to Nintendo's decision this year to prevent "LPers" (those that make Let's Play videos) and Ubisoft's declaration last week that it wouldn't intercede. My hope is that Nintendo will see this and change its mind, returning an incentive to those that wish to help promote its products.

The document also answers a question I've been getting frequently about the emphasis of second-screen experiences at E3 this year. Given the growing number of mobile and tablet views (one-third of all gaming views on YouTube and double in 2012 what it was in 2011), publishers are trying to capitalize on the trend.

Click to enlarge

One interpretation of the data is that people are using the closest device (a phone or tablet) to access tip videos while playing. Either that, or more of us are watching gaming while in the bathroom than ever before. Publishers are banking on the former.

Many marketers work overtime to confuse us about money. They take advantage of our misunderstanding of the time value of money, of our aversion to reading the fine print, of our childish need for instant gratification and most of all, our conflicted emotional connection to money.

Confusing customers about money can be quite profitable if that's the sort of work you're willing to do.

A few things to keep in mind:

The amount of money you have has nothing to do with whether or not you're a good person. Being good with money is a little like being good with cards. People who are good at playing cards aren't better or worse than anyone else, they're just better at playing crazy eights.

Money spent on one thing is still the same as money spent on something else. A $500 needless fee on a million-dollar mortgage closing is just as much money as a $500 tip at McDonalds.

If you borrow money to make money, you've done something magical. On the other hand, if you go into debt to pay your bills or buy something you want but don't need, you've done something stupid. Stupid and short-sighted and ultimately life-changing for the worse.

To go along with #3: getting out of debt as fast as you possibly can is the smartest thing you can do with your money. If you need proof to confirm this, ask anyone with money to show you the math. Hint: credit card companies make more profit than just about any other companies in the world.

There's no difference (in terms of the money you have) between spending money and not earning money, no difference between not-spending money and getting a raise (actually, because of taxes, you're even better off not-spending). If you've got cable TV and a cell phone, you're spending $4,000 a year. $6,000 before taxes.

If money is an emotional issue for you, you've just put your finger on a big part of the problem. No one who is good at building houses has an emotional problem with hammers. Place your emotional problems where they belong, and focus on seeing money as a tool.

Like many important, professional endeavors, money has its own vocabulary. It won't take you long to learn what opportunity cost, investment, debt, leverage, basis points and sunk costs mean, but it'll be worth your time.

Never sign a contract or make an investment that you don't understand at least as well as the person on the other side of the transaction.

If you've got a job, a steady day job, now's the time to figure out a way to earn extra income in your spare time. Freelancing, selling items on Etsy, building a side business--two hundred extra dollars every week for the next twenty years can create peace of mind for a lifetime.

The chances that a small-time investor will get lucky by timing the stock market or with other opaque investments are slim, fat and none.

The way you feel about giving money to good causes has a lot to do with the way you feel about money.

Don't get caught confusing money with security. There are lots of ways to build a life that's more secure, starting with the stories you tell yourself, the people you surround yourself with and the cost of living you embrace. Money is one way to feel more secure, but money alone won't deliver this.

Rich guys busted for insider trading weren't risking everything to make more money for the security that money can bring. In fact, the very opposite is starkly shown here. The insatiable need for more money is directly (and ironically) related to not being clear about what will ultimately bring security. Like many on this path, now they have neither money nor security.

In our culture, making more money feels like winning, and winning feels like the point.

Within very wide bands, more money doesn't make people happier. Learning how to think about money, though, usually does.

In the long run, doing work that's important leads to more happiness than doing work that's merely profitable.

Most analysts have been able to understand and explain the genesis of the mass demonstrations that have taken place in Brazil in recent weeks. It was the rise in public transport fares that unleashed the nationwide wave of struggle, affecting all the major cities which must play host to the matches of the upcoming 2014 football World Cup. From this followed a whole cascade of demands concerning health, education, opposition to privatisation, opposition to repression, and generally standing up for public services, all of which have been put into question by the government of Dilma Rousseff and her friends in the Workers’ Party (PT). The ‘ocean of roses’ on which Lula thought he could navigate has transformed into a vast mass of thorns.

All the same, among these analyses, certain aspects are missing – elements which we think are decisive not only to understand the drives of the current protests, but also to understand the inherent character of their demands: namely, the political role of football as a phenomenon that crushes people’s consciousness, the pernicious power of stadiums as a site of mass depoliticisation, urban planning in the service of a new sport-centred environment, and, indeed, the dictatorial strategy of FIFA carried out under the aegis of a bureaucracy that imposes its diktats.

In 2012, after a long battle in parliament, the Brazilian state finally accepted the Lei Geral da Copa, whose driving force was FIFA. This ‘General World Cup Bill’ imposes bank holidays on the host cities on the days when the Brazilian national team is playing, reduces the number of seats for the general public (while increasing their cost), and allows alcoholic drinks in the stadiums. The legal ban on sales within Brazil’s football grounds has been lifted in order to preserve FIFA’s juicy contract with the multinational Anheuser Busch, which produces Budweiser lager, one of the competition’s main sponsors. The ‘General Bill’ similarly exempts the companies working on the World Cup (including those renovating or building stadiums) from taxes and charges, bans (Article 11) the sale of any merchandise within ‘official competition sites, in their immediate surroundings and principal access routes’ and penalises (Article 23) bars who attempt to show the matches or promote certain brands. To top it all, the Bill considers as a federal crime any attack on the image of FIFA or its sponsors, as well as so-called ‘ambush’ or ‘intrusive’ marketing which uses any image related to the competition, or football in general, without authorisation. In order to impose the penalties as quickly as possible – from a simple fine, up to a two-year prison sentence – FIFA wants to force the creation of special courts during the World Cup. Now, this kind of measure runs contrary to the Brazilian Constitution of 1988, which, indeed, stipulates – as in most developed countries – that there can be no special courts or justice, and that justice must be the same for everyone.

The unconstitutionality of these proposals does not, however, seem to be stopping FIFA, which wants to repeat what it put in place during the 2010 World Cup held in South Africa, with the creation of 56 ‘World Cup courts’. FIFA wants total impunity for any harm caused to individuals, businesses and institutions during the competition. The Brazilian federal state is, therefore, responsible ‘for all types of damages resulting from any kind of incident or accident in relation to the events’. As such, it could be forced to reimburse FIFA and its commercial partners in case of an attack, incidents resulting from organised crime, natural disasters, etc. By way of this General World Cup Bill, FIFA – much like the International Olympic Committee (IOC) – is thus capable of imposing its iniquitous law on the country hosting a sporting event. FIFA never ceases to remind us that it is not being demanding – rather, it is Brazil, which put itself forward to host the competition, which is putting on the pressure. The law of sporting federations thus imposes itself on the law of the country, without rousing any indignation among its political leaders!

Yet even faced the FIFA bulldozer, the TV reports cannot help but show a number of demonstrators hostile to the football World Cup: ‘Don’t come to see the Cup’ is one of the slogans most often advanced by protestors, standing up against the World Cup because they understand that it entails massive speculation (building firms making ever increasing demands on the state for more money) and the expulsion of thousands of families, that it means razing houses and residential districts to the ground – and not just favelas – to clear the way for motorways linking the airport to the new Castelao stadium. It is nothing other than social and urban cleansing in the name of the success of the World Cup.

The immense resistance which we are now seeing seems to indicate that people have grasped a new level of consciousness with regard to futebol, that opium of the people for which Brazilians today seem to have much less appreciation. The ‘king’ Pele is thus a particular target of the demonstrators, having proclaimed ‘Let's forget all this confusion that’s happening in Brazil, all these protests, and remember that the national team is our country, our blood’. Brazilians appreciated still less the arrogance of Jérôme Valcke, general secretary of FIFA, who last year called on Brazil to ‘kick their arses into gear’. The expression resonated in the ears of the Brazilian organisers as an insult. It is true that this bureaucrat, for all his arrogance, isn’t too careful with words. Did he not, just a few months back, advance some at least rather curious proposals?... ‘I will say something which is crazy, but less democracy is sometimes better for organising a World Cup. When you have a very strong head of state who can decide, as maybe Putin can do in 2018... that is easier for us organisers than a country such as Germany, where you have to negotiate at different levels’. What a great humanist, this Mr Valcke!

The FIFA president Sepp Blatter (also a member of the IOC) has not stayed on the sidelines, but rather backed up his general secretary’s comments, himself stating that the 1978 World Cup in Argentina was ‘a kind of reconciliation of the public, of the people of Argentina, with the system, the political system, the military system at the time’, all the while congratulating himself on this organisational success. We should not forget that this competition went ahead despite numerous calls for a boycott, for example in France, since the country was then living under the yoke of the bloody regime of General Videla, who died just last month. The members of trade union organisations and left-wing parties who were being cut up with saws just a few hundred metres from the stadium, at the sinister Navy School of Mechanics, would surely appreciate – if any are still alive – President Blatter’s words. But at the time, the Argentinian people cheered on its footballing heroes without understanding that this was helping the dictatorship to establish its regime. Today, Joseph Blatter is badly mistaken when he says that ‘football is stronger than people’s dissatisfaction’. Our wager is that the Brazilian youth will make him realise this.

Michel Caillat is a professor of economics at the University of Orléans. Marc Perelmen is a professor of aesthetics at Nanterre. Caillat is the author, among other works, of Sport et civilisation, L’Harmattan (2000). Marc Perelman’s books include Barbaric Sport.

When I started working in the NHS I pretty much accepted the mainstream view – that psychiatric drugs work, that the categories of mental disorder have been established via solid scientific research, and that we are now on the cusp of understanding the biology of mental illness. It took many years of practice and research to learn that such assertions do not stand up to serious scientific scrutiny.

My choice of 10 books here reflects the writings of diverse commentators – patients, academics, novelists, psychologists and critical psychiatrists – who have at different times challenged our understanding of mental illnesses and how best to treat them.

Written by one of North America's foremost investigative journalists, this exceptional book tells the story of the globalisation of western psychiatry. Watters lays bare the strategies through which the pharmaceutical industry has converted new populations to our way of understanding and treating mental disorder, making billions in the process.

Whitaker's now-classic book on critical psychiatry tackles one of the great dogmas of psychiatric lore: that antipsychotic medications work. While agreeing that short-term use of these drugs can help stabilise patients, Whitaker documents the mounting evidence showing how their long-term deployment has counter-therapeutic effects. The evidence leads to a startling conclusion: that the "chronic" nature of many severe mental disorders may be partly or entirely caused by the antipsychotic drugs patients are encouraged to consume.

While Whitaker's book tackles antipsychotics, the Harvard psychologist Irving Kirsch explodes the antidepressant myth. By tabulating the results of all the clinical trials conducted on antidepressants (including those buried by the pharmaceutical industry), he reveals that antidepressants actually work no better than placebos for 85% of patients. Even though his results have withstood sustained criticism and have also been replicated, antidepressant use has continued to soar. In 2011 there were 46.7m prescriptions dispensed to the English public alone. The lesson here is: don't judge the excellence of a book by its impact on policy.

After witnessing the atrocities of the second world war, Jung implored future generations to become more aware of the human capacity for destructiveness. The message of this book: cease projecting your destructiveness on to others and become conscious of the destructive side of yourself. This message is crucial for certain care workers who, by self-identifying as altruistic, are prone to allow their unacknowledged destructiveness to corrupt their well-meaning intentions.

In this harrowing and illuminating book, Sally Brampton, a former editor of Elle magazine, leads us into the vortex of her devastating breakdown. She graphically teaches how awful emotional suffering can be, how patients can so often be misguided by professionals, but ultimately how suffering can not only pass in time, but sometimes also impart essential lessons for the art of living.

This book tells the story of how a bright and sane young woman ends up in a psychiatric asylum. There she is given electroconvulsive and insulin therapy but not a drop of the feminism she obviously needs. Plath shows how healthy ambition can easily transmute into misery in the face of limited options and the devilish innocence of uncomprehending authorities. The message is still a pertinent one: suffering is not always sickness but often the sanest response to an imperfect world.

Gladwell has become a guru of the "smart thinking" set. There is a simple reason: he knows how to tell a story. And this book is rich with compelling stories about men and women who, as he puts it, "are so accomplished and so extraordinary and so outside of ordinary experience that they are as puzzling to the rest of us". What is gripping – and sometimes tragic – about outliers is that they are so regularly misunderstood. We are too prone to recast their difference as pathology. Gladwell deploys insightful psychological research to challenge our most basic assumptions about normality.

Here Freud locates our emotional problems in the conditions of modern civilisation. While its rules lead us to repress our instinctual needs (creating frustration), we know that gratifying these needs will be penalised (creating guilt and anxiety). Given this catch-22, it is no surprise Freud argues that the pursuit of happiness is ultimately futile. Better to dedicate ourselves to learning how to love and work productively.

This book tells the tale of how young Werther, having fallen for a betrothed woman, takes his own life to flee the awful love triangle. It became a sensation throughout Europe and led to a spate of copycat suicides among young men. These consequences are tragic yet fascinating. We know that once a clinical "disorder" or "trait" wins strong cultural recognition an epidemic can follow. This happened with anorexia and self-harm. Does psychiatry merely respond to or actually help create the epidemics it purports to cure?

10. DSM-III (The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders)

The DSM-III, although not recommended reading, surely deserves its status as the most influential book in psychiatric history. It established the diagnoses still broadly used today. Later editions (including the recent DSM-5) are mere footnotes to this vast bible of mental illness. And yet, perhaps no single book in medicine has caused so much controversy. Has it medicalised too much normality? Has it become a moneymaking tool for the American Psychiatric Association and the pharmaceutical industry? Has it really improved patients' lives? These important debates rage on …

Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari were a philosophical odd couple. Deleuze was a rising philosopher who was concerned with his philosophical predecessors: Friedrich Nietzsche, Baruch Spinoza and Henri Bergson. Guattari was a psychotherapist never had a “formal” education in the field. He learned the trade by working at an experimental psychiatric clinic and religiously attending the seminars of psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan.

In the late 60′s, Deleuze and Guattari met and decided to write a book together. The work was mostly coordinated through letters the two exchanged. Guattari would send notes and scribbles to Deleuze, who would compile the thoughts into what finally became “Anti-Oedipus.” The book was an instant hit in France. However, it tooks years for Deleuze and Guattari’s work to achieve its current infamy in American cultural studies and critical theory classrooms.

The two theorists would go on to write other texts together, including “A Thousand Plateaus”, but each had their own highly successful academic careers. Deleuze continued writing about philosophy, taught at Paris VIII University, and was heavily involved with activism, art, and film. Guattari worked heavily with anti-psychiatry movements and other radical political organizations. He was incessantly creating political groups and organizations, traveled abroad to promote clinical schizoanalysis, and even advised the French cultural minister.

The book, “Intersecting Lives” by Francois Dosse details the life and work of both authors. Clocking in at 672 pages, the tome meticulously details their work as well as their personal lives. Here are a few highlights.

#1 Guattari Helped Run a Psych Clinic That Doubled as a Communist Utopia and Insane Circus

In 1955, Guattari started working at La Borde, a psychiatric clinic in France.

La Borde wasn’t your average psych clinic. The clinic’s constitution imagined the organization as a “communist utopia.” This utopia required the disposal of formalized bureaucracy. Staff members were required to rotate in and out of manual labor to destabilize the hierarchies that existed between the “intellectual” staff and the “laboring” staff. Salaries were debated and decided in democratic committee meetings which, as you can imagine, often devolved into a shit-show.

Patient and staff co-mingling was highly encouraged. Communal spaces were set up for patients and doctors alike to plays cards or read magazines. Nurses were often indistinguishable from patients. Patients were even given responsibility over administrative tasks and could serve on the board of the clinic. One patient even served as treasurer and handled La Borde’s bank account.

When Guattari showed up, he quickly took on a leadership role. He described his demeanor towards staff as “rigidly militant.” This certainly wasn’t Guattari’s first rodeo. As the head of a pro-Tito worker’s brigade in 1949, he “confiscated the meal tickets of any recalcitrant workers who complained or dragged their feet when it came to carrying stones or digging trenches”. At La Borde, Guattari was known to order patients who refused to get out of bed to partake in some of the scheduled activities. That might sound kind of shitty, until the book goes on to describe the scene at La Borde:

Daily life was busy at the clinic: prior to the use of narcoleptic and drug therapy, conflicts between patients often erupted into fights, and it was not unusual for people to get beaned by coffee pots of tools.

Guattari eventually loosened up on his authoritarian tendencies after landing in a hospital as part of a draft-dodging scheme (Guattari was avoiding being sent to Algeria). As a patient, Guattari realized that life under the rule of tyrannical nurses was not so great. The realization followed him back to La Borde.

Guattari would often invite his friends and fellow academics to hang out in La Borde where they took up arts and crafts, worked, and even started careers at La Borde. As a result, La Borde turned into a hot-spot for intellectuals, draft-dodgers and, of course, the mentally ill.

One of those friends, Jean-Baptiste Thierree was a Maoist who performed magic. Thierree received treatment from Guattari while performing magic shows for other patients . One day, Thierree had an idea: he was going to write to Charlie Chaplin’s daughter and start a circus with her.

Victoria Chaplin not only responded, she married Jean-Baptiste. And the circus? Well, the two started it at La Borde. Because if “crippling mental illness” calls for one thing, it’s more clowns and loud noises.

The Thierree-Chaplin couple created particularly intense activities at La Borde with their circus tents, horses, wild animals, and snakes; the patients were invited to participate.

That was followed by integrating catatonic patients into the circus. Grossly irressponsible? Maybe, but it kind of worked in treating the patient.

I [Jean-Baptise] had this idea of masking him [the catonic patient] from head to toe and when he was like that he did whatever I wanted him to do. I always asked him, ‘Why do you move when you are masked?’ He never answered me, and one day he said. ‘because it’s not serious’.

When May ’68 erupted Guattari encouraged his patients to attend. This was the last straw for the director of the clinic, who soon kicked out Guattari because of his rampant shenanigans

It was at La Borde that Guattari acquired the experiences and knowledge necessary to theorize the figure of the schizophrenic and schizoanalysis.

#2 Deleuze Hated Crazy People

Many have accused Deleuze and Guattari of trivializing the plight of the deranged and being detached from their material realities. For Guattari, nothing is further from the truth. For Deleuze, this is sort of true. Deleuze’s friend Jean-Pierre Muyard was a medical student who introduced Deleuze to many ideas on psychosis and madness. Muyard recounts:

He [Deleuze] said ‘I discuss psychosis and madness, but I don’t know anything about it from the inside.’ But he was also phobic about deranged people and couldn’t have spent even an hour at La Borde.

When Deleuze would visit Guattari, he “avoided the unbearable madness at La Borde.” One dinner in particular with Felix was interrupted by a some chaos as La Borde. Deleuze’s response was less commendable:

We got a call from La Borde saying that a guy had set fire to the chateau chapel and run off into the woods. Gilles blanched, I froze, and Felix called for help to find this guy. At that point, Gilles said to me, ‘how can you stand those schizos’?”

#3 Guattari Was Almost Lacan’s Anointed Successor

One might find it slightly ironic that the author who philosophically destroyed the project of psychoanalysis and Lacan was kind of infatuated with the man. Guattari religiously attended Lacan’s seminar and became a patient of Lacan for a hefty fee. Guattari eventually ordered all of La Borde’s staff to attend Lacan’s seminar and start analysis with Lacan “if they wanted to keep working at the clinic.”

During the 1950s, Guattari was a strict Lacanian. Even his friends would call him “Lacan” as a joke. In 1964, Lacan chose Guattari as a lieutenant at the newly created Freudian School of Paris. Guattari was sure that Lacan anoint him as a “preferred partner”

Lacan met with his patients for sessions often lasting as little as four minutes. Guattari, opting for the premium-package, paid for the pleasure of driving Lacan home. The in-ride discussion was, according to Lacan, “part of the analysis.”

During one such couch-session with Lacan, Guattari mentioned to Lacan that Roland Barthes was interested in publishing one of Guattari’s papers in Communications.

Guattari talked to Lacan about it while he was on the couch, but the master was indignant: What? Why not publish it in his journal, Scilicet? Lacan ordered his patient to choose his camp. Guattari was forced to comply and asked Barthes to remove his text from the issue.

Well that’s not so bad, Lacan had taken a special interest in Guattari and wanted to take him under his wing. Publishing Guattari’s work under his own journal instead of Barthes’ isn’t too bad. But Lacan never published Guattari’s paper.

Scumbag Lacan

#4 Lacan Freaked Out About ‘Anti-Oedipus’ and Banned His Students From Discussing It

After Lacan had got wind that Guattari was writing “Anti-Oedipus”, Lacan curiously inquired about its contents. Guattari, not being an idiot, realized that he could not reveal to Lacan a book which attacked his entire academic career. “That was clearly not an option,” Guattari said in an interview, “Deleuze mistrusted Lacan like the plague.”

Guattari tried to assuage Lacan by lying, saying that it was Deleuze’s fault for only wanting to share a finished project. Lacan tried to investigate the matter by asking to meet Deleuze in person, who instead offered to talk to Lacan on the phone. At this point, Lacan decided the best course of action was to liquor up Guattari at a fancy restaurant so he could spill the beans on the new book.

At the dinner, Guattari did in fact explain the thematic elements of “Anti-Oedipus.” Lacan was, on the surface, receptive to the new ideas. Guattari tried to lie his ass off to Lacan to make his new ideas seem more Lacanian then they really were. Lacan eventually discovered the true content of the book, and that dinner was the last time the two ever meet.

When Lacan discovered how aggressive the book was with respect to his ideas, all the bridges were definitively burned. Not only would the two never see each other gain, but Lacan and his friends also started circulating a series of rumors about Guattari’s practice to discredit him in the psychoanalytic circles.

When “Anti-Oedipus” was finally published, Lacan censored any discussion of the book among his students. He forbade any debate about the book, and never mentioned it in his seminar. One student of Lacan noted that Lacan took “Anti-Oedipus” as “a personal attack that was all the more hurtful because he had made some gestures towards Deleuze, whom he respected.”

#5 Deleuze Considered Anti-Oedipus a Failure and Guattari was Severely Depressed

“Eight years after Anti-Oedipus was published, Deleuze considered it a failure. May ’68 and its dreams were long gone, leaving a bitter taste for those who had high hopes but were caught by the stale odors of conservatism.”

But for Guattari it was much worse:

His hyperactivity and the immense effort he had put into the book led to something of a collapse, a feeling of emptiness. Completing a work is never as satisfying as the many imagined possibilities and ongoing pleasures of a work in progress. ‘I feel like curling up into a tiny ball and being rid of all these politics of presence and prestige…The feeling is so strong that I resent Gilles for having dragged me into this mess”

#6 Deleuze Failed His University Admission Exam and Couldn’t Type

Despite his exceptional abilities, Deleuze failed the entrance examination for the ENS, even though his lectures drew large audiences and were considered must-see events

But it wasn’t all gloom and doom for Deleuze. He received a scholarship to study for the agregation exam and began attending Sorbonne.

When Deleuze was ready to write his thesis, he was shit-outta-luck, however, because he didn’t know how to use a typewriter. Luckily, Deleuze’s friend Michael Tournier typed up Deleuze’s work for him.

Michel Tournier’s friendly gesture was met with deep suspicion from Deleuze. After reading the typed manuscript, Deleuze “did not recognize what he had written and suspected that something had been deleted.” He gave a copy of his completed work to Tournier which read:

For Michel, the book that he typed and criticized, roundly protested, and may have even shortened since I’m sure that it was longer, but which also belongs to him somewhat as I owe him a lot (not for Hume) in philosophy

Neoreactionary excitement has generated a wave of strategy discussions, focused upon Moldbug’s Antiversity model of organized dissident knowledge. The most energetic example (orchestrated by Nydwracu) can be followed here, here, and here. Francis St. Pol’s substantial contribution is here.

Beyond curmudgeonly cynicism about youthful enthusiasm, these concerns, and a strain of pessimism that accompanies the recognition that the Cathedral owns media like the USN owns carrier groups, is there any explanation for Outside in hanging back from all this, and smoking sulkily in the corner? If there’s a single term that accounts for our reluctance, it’s cold turkey.

Keynesianism is far from the only contributor to left-modernist degeneration, but it’s ruinous enough to account for the destruction of civilization on its own. The fact that it’s most realistically conceived as a symptom — of democratized politics, and still deeper things — doesn’t affect its narrative role. The important point, understood widely enough to be acliché, is that Keynesian economics is an exact social analog of addiction at the level of the individual, slaved to what William Burroughs described as “the algebra of need.”

Money is made into a drug, and the solution to the pain of craving is to crank up the dose. However bad it gets, if you just scale-up the fix, the suffering goes away. Junkies can survive for a shockingly long time. Perhaps there’s no end to it (that’s a question for the Right on the Money discussion).

Outside the morgue, if there is an end — and every venture into neoreactionary strategy presumes it — there’s only one form it can take: cold turkey. To not be in the habit anymore, it is necessary to kick it. That’s going to be really nasty.

At the level of economic structure, the ‘blue pill’ isn’t just a comforting illusion, it’s a massive, deeply habitual, ultra-high tolerance (thanks Spandrell) fix, radically craved down to the cellular level. Society has been doing this for a long time, and by now it’s mainlining crates of the stuff. People die of cold turkey. If not quite the worst thing in the world, it’s an overwhelmingly-impressive simulation of exactly that. Rational argument doesn’t get close to addressing it.

Sure, junkies lie all the time, but the lies aren’t the basic problem. ‘Correcting’ the lies gets nowhere, because nobody is even really pretending. When the junky lies, he knows, you know, everybody knows that the fundamental message is simply: I want more junk. He’ll say anything that gets fractionally closer to the next fix. Hence the circus of democracy.

The pusher laughs at rational argument. There’s some well-meaning type saying: seriously, think about it, this is really messed up. Then there’s the ‘pusher’ — which is already a joke — because people are crawling to him on their knees. He doesn’t need to say anything. One more hit and the pain goes away for a while. That’s what matters. The rest is merely ‘superstructural’ (to go Right-wing Marxist on the topic).

There’s no way, ever, that from this deep in, one gets out before hitting bottom. The slide has to reach the limit, because short of that, the prospect of anesthesia trumps everything.

Western Civilization is a sick junky. It isn’t going to be argued out of its habit. First, it has to taste the floor. That’s just the way it is — ugly.

France is suffering within its means. 3.26 million unemployed, youth unemployment at 26.5 per cent, consumption declining, no economic growth for five years, a despised political class the majority think is corrupt and a President everyone thinks is merde. Riots in their suburbs, a rubbish rugby team and Germany setting the tone in Europe. How does French philosophy respond? By taking Oscar Wilde’s advice and avoiding arguments on the grounds that they are vulgar and often convincing. Some of their radical solutions are self-confessedly ‘impossible’, ‘paradoxical’, unthinkable’ and so on. But then, if impossible, they don’t exist. So what’s on offer is not even better than nothing. Years ago the late Weberian philosopher Ernest Gellner once commented that the reason some philosophers had given up on Hegel was not because they were too philistine to appreciate the depths but because they hadn’t yet given up on finding working solutions to problems. Having read Ian James’s fascinating book on these new French thinkers I fear that I too am going to be accused of philistine tendencies. Alas, it can’t be helped. Some of the new philosophy is intriguing, but much of it seems content to startle, unsettle and parade an ingrained belief that consistency is the last refuge of the unimaginative.

Gary Gutting, a renowned expert on French philosophy, has defended the impossible however, writing that some ‘… versions of continental thought regard the essential activity of reason not as the logical regimentation of thought but as the creative exercise of intellectual imagination. This view is characteristic of most important French philosophers since the 1960s, beginning with Foucault, Derrida and Deleuze. They maintain that the standard logic analytic philosophers use can merely explicate what is implicit in the concepts with which we happen to begin; such logic is useless for the essential philosophical task, which they maintain is learning to think beyond these concepts.’

He continues: ‘Continental philosophies of experience try to probe beneath the concepts of everyday experience to discover the meanings that underlie them, to think the conditions for the possibility of our concepts. By contrast, continental philosophies of imagination try to think beyond those concepts, to, in some sense, think what is impossible.’ Gutting thinks there is a substantial distinction to be made between continental and analytic philosophy and in the course of defending this now contested view he writes that ‘…analytic philosophy reads experience in terms of common-sense intuitions (often along with their developments and transformations in science) and understands reason in terms of formal logic. Continental philosophy, by contrast, typically sees experience as penetrating beyond the veneer of common-sense and science, and regards reason as more a matter of intellectual imagination than deductive rigor.’ If this is right then my disbelief in the causal efficacy of an absent ontology is merely a defect of my intellectual imagination! Well, whatever you might think about this, Gutting’s comments helpfully contextualise the new French philosophers that James writes about.

Ian James sets out to show that in the new French philosophy the idea of ‘new’ is its subject, where new is understood in terms of ‘rupture’ and ‘discontinuity’ and ‘novelty.’ The French philosophers wonder how the new is possible. Gilles Deleuze started this in the 1960’s in his philosophy of ‘difference.’ Lyotard, Derrida and Foucault continued. Lyotard’s ‘event’ seeks to explain how discourses are contested and thinking is transformed. Jeff Malpas thinks this ‘the founding moment of any postmodernism.’ Lyotard’s ‘The Different’ is defined as an instability in language and discourse. It is supposed to create ‘new addressees, new addressors, new significations and new referents’ and ‘new phrase families and new genres of discourse.’ Derrida’s late ‘Spectres of Marx’ is about going beyond existing research programmes, ‘… beyond any possible programming, new knowledge, new techniques, new political givens.’ Foucault talks about epistemic breaks as an ‘event’ in ‘The Order of Things.’ He asks, ‘ how is it that thought has a place in the space of the world, that it has its origin there, and that it never ceases to begin anew?’ He suggests a process that ‘… probably begins with an erosion from the outside, from a space which is, for thought, on the other side but in which it has never ceased to think from the very beginning.’

James discusses seven new French philosophers; Jean-Luc Marion, Jean-Luc Nancy, Bernard Stiegler, Catherine Malabou, Jacques Ranciere, Alain Badiou and Francois Laruelle. This is intended to be neither exhaustive nor up to date but rather an indicative group in support of an argument about a paradigm shift. These seven all agree with Foucault that the new comes from ‘an erosion from the outside.’ Five of them established themselves in the 1970’s. Two are younger and not yet established as much.

In the 1970’s the philosophers moved away from a linguistic paradigm which had dominated Derrida, Lyotard and Foucault. Signifiers, signifieds, the symbolic, discourse, text, writing, arche-writing were recast in terms of materiality, the concrete, ‘… worldliness, shared embodied existence and sensible-intelligible experience.’ The paradigm of structuralism and post structuralism as being a literary genre was subjected to its own ‘event’. John Mullarkey wrote in ‘Post-Continental Philosophy’ that the paradigm shift happened later than James claims, in 1988 with the publication of Deleuze’s ‘The Fold’, Badiou’s ‘Being and Event’, Henry’s ‘Seeing the Invisible’ and a discussion between Laruelle and Derrida on whether philosophy of science was possible. Mullarkey sees the paradigm shift as being one where the postmodernists realigned with ‘naturalism and with the life sciences, with mathematics and the reaffirmation of philosophy of “philosophy as a worldly and materialist thinking.” James agrees with this assessment. ‘Immanence’ was thought to be the essence of the paradigm shift at one time.

James pulls the paradigm shift back to the 1970’s and disputes the idea that immanence is a universal concern of the new philosophy. There are other shifts too. Concerns with the subject, subjectivity, community, politics, art are predominant. He notes that consideration of a broader base of recently historic thinkers includes Bergson, Sartre, Deleuze, Henry, Levinas, Henry Corbin, plus modern voices such as Clement Rosset, Christian Jambet, and Guy Lardreau as is found in Peter Hallward’s ‘The One and the Other: French Philosophy Today’ where we find talk of the ‘singularity. ‘If anything holds the field together, if anything (beyond the contingency of languages and institutions) allows us to speak here of a field … then it is the continuous persistence of singularity as the strong polarizing principle of the field as a whole.’ According to Halliward this paradigm of thinking is non-relational, involving ‘a radical refusal of mediation or representation.’ They refuse to engage with the world and therefore ‘ came to embrace a singular conception of thought to the degree that they judged the world incapable of redemption.’ French philosophy, on this account, is about anticipating the provision of an event producing relational accounts with the world, ‘in order to re-engage with the world and its possible transformation.’ What this means is that Derridean philosophers took the linguistic paradigm to show that philosophy was solipsistic, a practice whereby language represented language and therefore was cut off. These new philosophers wanted to leave that ghetto.

James excludes many new French philosophers. Key ones are those connected with philosophies of technology and science such as Bruno Latour, Dominique Lecourt and Michel Serres. He includes Stiegler, however. The purpose is to elaborate an argument. Derrida is important to Nancy, Stiegler and Malabou. They all moved away from deconstruction. Louis Althusser was important to Ranciere and Badiou who are both understood partly in terms of their distancing themselves from his thought. Laruelle calls his own thought ‘ non-Heideggerian deconstruction’ and after 1980 developed a ‘non-philosophy’ which, according to James ‘can be aligned with an Althussarian structural conception of science and theory.’

Badiou made the case against the linguistic paradigm of structuralism and post-structuralism in 1977 in his ‘The Theory of the Subject’, claiming that ‘it is materialism that we must found anew with the renovated arsenal of our mental powers.’ He thought the linguistic paradigm was anti-humanistic. Ranciere made a similar move in 1974 when he writes ‘ideology is not simply a collection of discourses or a system of representation’ in breaking with Althusser in ‘Althusser’s Lesson’. In 1979 Nancy wrote ‘Ego Sum’ which rejects the Lacanian understanding of the self in terms of structure, text or process. Nancy claims that Cartesian introspection uncovers an ego that is prior to any linguistic or symbolic enunciation. His ideas about ‘community, embodiment, shared existence and his ontology of the singular plural’ are all built on this Cartesian epistemic paradigm.

Laruelle’s ‘The Decline of Writing’ was published in 1977. In this he attacks the idea of ‘text’. He says that ‘text must be stripped of the ontological primacy with which structuralist ideology and the majority of “textual” ideologues comfort themselves.’ He replaces it with materialism, which is a heteronomy ‘more radical than that of the symbolic chain.’ He sees this as a reason for breaking with philosophy.

Malabou, of a younger generation, wasn’t writing in the 1970’s but continues the paradigm shift. (It is an interesting question how long a paradigm shift takes to stop happening and become settled. Her ‘Plasticity at the Dusk of Writing’ came out in 2005 so it seems a shift can take nearly thirty years in some cases.) She introduces a notion of ‘plasticity.’ This replaces writing as a key paradigm. Writing is a paradigm she links with linguistics, cybernetics and genetics. Plasticity serves a new materialism.

Marion and Stiegler weren’t writing in the 70s either. Marion replaces the structuralist view with an insistence that ‘givenness is anterior to any economy of writing or difference.’ This ‘unconditional givenness’ links with Malabou’s ‘plasticity.’ Technology according to Stiegler embodies a fundamental materiality of human life. That technology works as a prosthetics shows this, says Stiegler.

Post structuralism was concerned with the material. The Tel Quel group, Lacan and Althusserian thoughts about the materiality of ideology are all examples. But James insists that materialism was always a concern with the ‘materiality of discourse, of language and of the symbolic which might then form or inform material practices.’ Nancy, Stiegler, Malabou and Badiou develop materialist ontologies. Marion and Laruelle conclude that ‘… the immanent real … [is] … an instance which is in excess of ontology or any horizon of being whatsoever’ which seems to be a rather disappointingly banal claim that there’s an objective world that is independent of our phenomological awareness. Questions of the political and community are also developed in terms of this materialism. James says that ‘[s]uch a concern is most often expressed in terms of political change and an attempt, in the work of philosophy itself, to think the conditions of political transformation and to affirm, facilitate or bring about political change itself.’ Marion and Laruelle don’t have these concerns however.

Jean Luc Marion is a phenomenologist and theologian. He has been accused of inaugurating a ‘theological turn’ in phenomenology along with the likes of Michel Henry, Paul Ricoeur and Emmanuel Levinas. He is concerned with the implications of the ‘overcoming’ of metaphysics post Nietzsche and Heidegger. A Cartesian epistemic process provides an ontology based on the ego and God. God is not a metaphysical substance because Deity is conceived via the Cartesian process. In ‘The Idol and Distance’ we get a negative theology which replaces a metaphysical God as Substance, Being and Presence with a God as Infinite Distance, Separation and Withdrawal from Being. Nietzsche announced the death of the metaphysical God, according to Marion, but the God of Infinite Distance survived. God lies outside the limits of a Cartesian epistemology. Cartesianism ego defines the horizon of thought and so God is ‘… to expose oneself to what already no longer belongs to us.’ It is thinking close to Levinas’s.

Husserl attempted to provide a full reduction of the world into experiential terms. Nietzsche is understood as advancing the same idea in Marion: ‘Can the givenness in presence of each things be realized without any condition or restriction? This question marks Nietzsche’s last advance and Husserl’s point of arrival’ says Marion in ‘Logical Investigations.’ In ‘Reduction and Giveness’ the givenness replaces or is identical in the role it plays to the Cartesian ego and provides the ground for all instances of intuition, intention and signification. Marion sees himself as providing a third reduction of phenomenology: the first being Husserls’ reduction of objects into the transcendental ego; and the second being Heidegger’s idea of reducing phenomena to Dasein. Marion claims ‘the givenness of phenomena cannot be subsumed into any formal ontology or any horizon of being.’ ‘In the realm of reduction it is no longer a question of Being … Because Being never intervenes in order to permit the absolute givenness in which it plays not the slightest role.’ Phenomena were now reduced to what is given, without foundationalist underpinnings of an ego or Dasein. Metaphysical commitments were stripped away. Some proclaim this as the end of philosophy, but philosophy has to be understood very parochially and narrowly for this to be the case. There is no principled reason to so restrict the meaning.

This argument is connected to Derrida’s work on the ‘logic of the gift ’ in ‘Given Time.’ This is Derrida’s claim that ‘if an act of giving is to be pure, then there must be no return to the giver, no debt of recognition may occur in relation to the giver, nothing may be accrued as a result, either in the short term or through some process of deferral. Otherwise, the gift is not a gift but functions as a mode of exchange.’ Derrida claims ‘ the gift is annulled… as soon as it appears as gift or as soon as it signifies itself as gift, there is no longer any “logic of the gift.”’ Marion denies that Derrida’s logic of the gift can be applied to phenomenology. In anthropology and sociology ‘giving’ is always economic. But phenomenology is neither anthropological nor sociological but rather, says Marion in ‘Being Time’, uses a ‘paradox logic’ whereby ‘the given, issued from the process of giveness, appears but leaves concealed givenness itself, which becomes enigmatic.’ Phenomenology becomes on this conception like Borge’s ‘The Coin of Odin’ which is a coin with only one side or like being modest, which you can be but cannot know. Marion rejects sociological and anthropological models that are assumed by Derrida and so rejects Derrida’s deconstruction of Husserl. Derrida sees Husserlian phenomenology as being a product of the ‘temporal and temporalising economy of difference.’ Marion sees this as a metaphysical claim because it is grounding the phenomenal on something anterior. Derrida however claims that Marion’s is metaphysical too in that it is grounded on ego.

Marion rejects this because he sees phenomenality as resting on the anonymity of its source. It is ‘viewed as pure unconditioned giving prior to any other horizon, economic, ontological or otherwise.’ His view is criticized as being too thin. It is a ‘negative phenomenology’ according to Janicaud. It’s thinness leaves it open to theological interpretation, ‘… a mere negative propaedeutic for his theology’ as Christina Gschwandtner says. Marion says his phenomenology ‘gives all that is and appears’ and so is neither thin nor a misreading of Husserl. It is unconditional and prior to intention and signification with the possibility that it may saturate any intuition in characteristically surprising, unexpected, unforeseen and unpredictable ways. This saturation reverses the Kantian notion that the subject constitutes the phenomenal: in Marion the given constitutes the self.

Saturised phenomena can be understood in terms of ‘the event,’ ‘the idol’, ‘the flesh’ and ‘the icon.’ An event is historical and felt by populations ‘in excess of any singular interpretational directedness or horizon of expectation ’ and so is a bit like Ricoeur’s hermeneutic history and Badiou’s ‘event’; ‘The idol’ is how art, such as a painting, ‘gives a sensible intuition or sensory perception which is in excess of any determinate meaning, concept, category or classification’ and this is rather like Derrida’s ‘difference’ and Nancy on artworks; Flesh is ‘the fundamental medium of givenness itself.’ The icon is ‘ the gaze of the other upon the self…. The face of the other, it is not constituted by intentional consciousness but rather imposes itself upon it in and of itself.’ He controversially aligns all this to a theology that is Christian and specifically Roman Catholic.

Jean-Luc Nancy is prolific. He departs from Derridean post-structuralism by reintroducing erased terms. He is post-phenomenological. James aligns him with Blanchot and Levinas rather than Heidegger. He aims to develop an ontology of community and the political such that the subject is entwined rather than individualistic. He thinks art has a central role in this. Nancy argues that the world always makes sense, ‘and does so before or prior to conceptual determination, and prior to giving it a fixed signification or attributing to it predicates or characteristics.’ He has a notion of finite thinking that limits this limitness. He is indebted to Blanchot and his ‘Infinite Conversation.’ Sense is always linked to materiality, the way ‘worldly existence is disclosed to us through situated and embodied being.’ The relation of the body with the world is important; bodies are not in the world but towards it, exposed to it so that the meaning of the body and the world becomes mutual and shared. The idea is that the sense is always one of codependency. In this the dual meaning of ‘touch’ is an important metaphor. In ‘The Muses’ where he discusses art Nancy writes: ‘Touch is nothing other than the touch of sense altogether and of all the senses. It is their sensuality as such … touch presents the proper moment of sensible exteriority, it presents it as such and as sensible’ and ‘Touch forms one body with sensing, or it makes of sensing a body, it is simply the corpus of the senses.’ James calls it the hinge between sense as the horizon of meaningfulness and sense understood as sense perception. It is a key to the idea of a ‘shared material existence.’

The New York Times ran an article a few days ago that points toward one of the more important lessons of our time, a lesson that will almost certainly be ignored.

Headlined “Data-Driven Tech Industry Is Shaken by Online Privacy Fears,” it described how upset members of Silicon Valley’s elite have been by the revelations of the National Security Agency’s Prism program.

The piece, by David Streitfeld and Quentin Hardy, was nicely written, with a generous serving of appropriate irony. “The dreamers, brains and cranks who built the Internet hoped it would be a tool of liberation and knowledge,” they began. “Last week, an altogether bleaker vision emerged with new revelations of how the United States government is using it as a monitoring and tracking device.”

Then came the kicker: “In Silicon Valley, a place not used to second-guessing the bright future it is eternally building, there was a palpable sense of dismay.”

That nails it. No one is more convinced that technology is the gateway to a new Eden than the technologists themselves, and no one is more surprised than they are when things turn out to be more complicated than expected.

The reason I find the Times article so significant is that the privacy concerns at the heart of the Prism imbroglio are only the tip of the technological iceberg. The Internet is far from the only cutting edge technology that presents tremendous opportunities for intentional abuse or unintentional disaster, and Silicon Valley’s engineers and scientists are far from the only ones who have routinely ignored the dangers.

There’s a second irony here that Streitfeld and Hardy didn’t mention. While the security branches of government have joined the profiteers and thieves in exploiting the power of the Internet for questionable ends, realistically our best hope of protection from those ends lies in the hands of­­—you guessed it—the government. Libertarians will disagree, but there’s abundant evidence to suggest that Silicon Valley’s failure to rigorously defend the public interest in its corner of the technological universe is the rule rather than the exception. Thus the answer to the question, “Who’s watching the technological store?” is basically, “Nobody.”

Remember Bill Joy’s famous essay in Wired, “Why the Future Doesn’t Need Us”? It's surprising to realize that 13 years have passed since it appeared. In it, Joy warned of three specific technologies that concerned him: robotics, genetic engineering, and nanotech. Like the Internet, each holds tremendous promise, but each also holds tremendous risks. Joy urged that the risks be seriously addressed before it’s too late, and said he remained optimistic we would find ways to do so.

As far as I can tell, the momentum toward exploitation of all three technologies continues unabated. If anything, it’s accelerated. I'm not aware of any concurrent momentum toward establishing effective precautions.

Joy issued another plea for restraint five years later, less known, but relevant to the discussion here. It was an an op-ed piece in the New York Times, co-authored with the futurist Ray Kurzweil and headlined “Recipe for Destruction.” In it they denounced the decision by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services to publish online the genome of the 1918 influenza virus responsible for the deaths of 50 million people worldwide. To publicly release such information in an era when the techniques of synthetic biology are widely available, they said, was tantamount to advertising “the design of a weapon of mass destruction.” Joy and Kurzweil called for an "international dialog" on ways to prevent lethal genetic codes from "falling into the wrong hands." They also called for “a new Manhattan Project" to develop specific defenses against new biological viral threats, natural or human made.

Christine Daniloff/iMol

In connection with the book I’m writing, two months ago I emailed Joy to ask him how much progress he’d seen toward the sorts of safeguards he and Kurzweil proposed. Here’s his response:

Doug:

Since the article, I have been focused on investments for sustainability. I haven't been tracking the progress on what we suggested. I know of nothing substantial that has been done to address any of these. But then again, I'm not "in the loop" on all such things, so perhaps something has been done; to find that out would be a pleasant upside surprise.

Best,

Bill

There’s a couple of implicit suggestions in Joy’s response, beyond what he says explicitly. First, although he’s careful to say he’s not aware of anything substantial having been accomplished to address his concerns, I think it’s fair to assume he would be aware of any significant efforts in that regard, had they materialized.

Second, the fact that Joy’s attentions are directed toward other endeavors represents a big part of the problem. All of us have our attentions directed elsewhere – they have to be. We can’t spend full time trying to see that the potential dangers of a whole range of incredibly powerful technologies are being adequately addressed. Nonetheless, thousands of people arespending full time, day after day, week after week, trying to find ways to exploit those incredibly powerful technologies. Often they're well paid for doing so; almost always they’re hoping for a payoff at the end. Undoubtedly some of them are working carefully; undoubtedly others aren’t. The problem is that the balance between ambition and restraint seems radically tilted toward risk and irresponsibility.

As I say, like it or not, our best bet for oversight is the government. Not surprisingly, we can't take much comfort in that fact. For example, in 2010, after a lengthy series of hearings on synthetic biology, the Presidential Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues found “no reason to endorse additional federal regulations or a moratorium on work in this field at this time." This prompted an open letter signed by the leaders of more than fifty environmental organizations calling the Commission’s conclusions hopelessly inadequate. "We are disappointed that 'business as usual' has won out over precaution in the commission's report," the letter said. "Self regulation amounts to no regulation.”

The story is much the same with nanotechnology. The National Nanotechnology Initiative, which is responsible for coordinating the activities of 15 federal agencies that distribute government money for nanotech research and development, has been the focus of ferocious criticism for spending almost all of its funds promoting nanotech’s commercial prospects while paying virtually no attention to its safety. A survey, meanwhile, found that some 60 percent of American nanotechnology companies have ignored government recommendations regarding safety precautions in their workplaces.

Citing that survey, the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology said it's "critical" that appropriate federal agencies "engage" with companies to increase their awareness of safety issues and their ability to address them. And how should this engagement proceed? Why, in a "non-regulatory capacity," of course!

Like Bill Joy, I can’t claim to have kept track of every attempt, either by government or by industry, to monitor and regulate the dangers inherent in synthetic biology – or in nanotechnology and robotics. I have other things to do. I think it’s a safe bet, however, that neither government nor industry have pursued their responsibilities in those areas as aggressively as the NSA has pursued its surveillance of the Internet, despite the fact that their potential for evil are at least as severe, and probably more so.

It’s true, I’m sure, that the web can be an effective tool for uncovering terrorist plots involving other technologies—someone hoping to unleash a genetically engineered virus might well leave tracks there, for example. As a pronounced civil libertarian, It feels odd to say it, but I hope the NSA is watching out for those types of threats. These are the devil's bargains our technologies lead us into.

I’ll close by noting the comments made nearly half a century ago by a scientist who can be considered Bill Joy’s predecessor in the role of technological Cassandra. Norbert Wiener was the founder of cybernetics, and in that role made foundational contributions to the digital technologies that are so forcefully reshaping our world today. Unlike many technologists, however, he worried a lot about the uses to which some of his theories might be put, so much so that he turned down many offers of corporate and military research contracts, at significant cost to his career.

Wiener harbored an undisguised contempt for the “gadget worshipers” among his colleagues who rushed to exploit their knowledge without due consideration of the consequences likely to ensue. They fail to appreciate, he said, that “a sense of the tragic" is a prerequisite to the exercise of scientific and technological power. The scientist with an appreciation of the tragic, he said, "will not leap in where angels fear to tread, unless he is prepared to accept the punishment of the fallen angels.”

Technology, he added, is a two-edged sword, “and sooner or later it will cut you deep.”

Things that sucked about E3: The wrap-up. The entire Internet is too busy sucking Sony's dick because they happen to be not quite as gut-wrenchingly shitty as Microsoft this year, they've failed to notice that Sony will now start charging a fee just to play online. And all you idiots emailing me to say that you get "free" games with your PSN account are morons. It's not free, you're paying for it. And by the way, what do you think will happen to all those incentives to sign up for an account once Sony becomes the dominant gaming network? Think they're going to keep giving you free shit because they like you?..

E3 2013 is underway in Los Angeles, and now that the console makers and big-name software publishers have held their big events, we still have a few questions about this whole “next-generation” business.

1. Will Microsoft blink?

Sony swung for the fences with its big PlayStation 4 press conference, one-upping the Xbox One with a $100-cheaper-than-thou price tag, no restrictions on used games, and no always-on Internet connection required to play. With Nintendo once again refusing to go toe-to-toe with the other two in the “next-gen console” competition, we’ve got a familiar two-horse race once again between Xbox and PlayStation. Only this time it’s turned into a game of chicken, and the ball is in Microsoft’s court.

Sony scored points with its sexy new machine while Microsoft has created a big, boring, black brick. Sony is loosening the knots on its insular ecosystem while Microsoft is tightening its grip. But the biggest problem now facing Redmond is the price difference. With both companies closely watching every move made by the other, Microsoft has to know that it’s facing an uphill battle against the PlayStation 4′s more attractive price.

Ironically, last generation, their roles were reversed; Xbox 360 was very affordable while PlayStation 3 was considered far too expensive at launch. Both companies clearly took notes during that battle eight years ago, but Microsoft seems to have written down all the wrong cues.

Will Microsoft step up to the plate and lower the Xbox One’s price, even if it means taking a loss (as Sony will no doubt be doing)?

2. Does Nintendo still matter?

I know I’ve beaten this dead horsebefore, so go right ahead and sharpen those flaying knives, Nintendo fans. But I just don’t get the appeal of the Wii U. I didn’t understand what was so great about it when it was first announced, and Nintendo’s showing at E3 hasn’t changed my mind. Their hardware is about to be made obsolete when Microsoft’s and Sony’s new powerhouses arrive later this year.

Neither EA nor Ubisoft — who held the other two big press events on Monday — made a single mention of games made for the Wii U in their presentations. The Wii U’s only worthwhile titles so far are from Nintendo’s (very) old franchises or re-releases of third-party games from Xbox 360′s and PS4′s back catalog (like Mass Effect 3, Batman: Arkham City, Deus Ex: Human Revolution, et. al.). Nintendo looks like it’s standing still compared to its two biggest rivals, and without the gimmicky fun of the Wii motion controller to propel them foreword this time, there’s just nothing going on at Nintendo worth buzzing about.

3. Where were the E3 surprises?

Aside from some great-looking indie games and a couple of new IPs from Ubisoft, this has been a surprise-free E3 so far. Where are all the great surprises from yesteryear that set the convention floor (and fans at home) abuzz and made big headlines?

I remember when Microsoft, Sony, and Nintendo would round out their big shows with jaw-dropping announcements of titles that no one had the slightest inkling was in the works. Granted, it’s harder than ever to keep spoilers from leaking, but I miss those shocking, grin-inducing “wow” moments. Heck, even the cheesy celebrity appearances gave the proceedings some flair.

4. Why do I need a new Xbox?

Sony made a strong case for upgrading to the PS4 thanks to welcome features for power users, some fantastic-looking games, and a decent price. But where Sony focused on gaming, Microsoft has recast the Xbox as the central media hub for your home, and it feels like games are just one bullet point on the long laundry list of things the Xbox One can do.

Don’t get me wrong. Some of the new games look good. Really good. But are better graphics and bigger game worlds enough to justify upgrading to a new console? I’ve been an Xbox fan since the first one, but Microsoft’s press conference this week did nothing to convince me that I need to let go of my Xbox 360 — and the $500 price makes it a luxury, not a necessity.

5. Why were there so many tech glitches at the console events?

I know we don’t live in a perfect world. And technology is one of the least-perfect inventions of man. Tech is complicated, moody, and can always be counted on to malfunction at the most inopportune moment.

But come on.

This is Microsoft and Sony we’re talking about, for crying out loud. They’re two of the biggest and most respected tech companies in the world. If anybody can bring to the table enough hardware to ensure that a big, multimillion dollar media extravaganza goes off without a hitch, it’s these guys. And yet both companies’ events suffered from multiple instances of frozen hardware, absent audio, and more. What the heck, people?

6. Is the new Halo game for Xbox One Halo 5?

And if so, why didn’t they just call it that? When Halo 4 came out last year, 343 Industries made a lot of noise about it being the first in a new trilogy. So why all the mystery now? It’s all but guaranteed that this new game is Halo 5. Unless they’re going to drop the numbers and go with a new naming convention, like subtitles. Regardless, it’s obvious this is the next chapter in Master Chief’s story. I can’t wait to find out how he finds himself in this striking desert setting, in damaged armor.

7. What the heck is The Order: 1886, and how soon can I get it!?

This PS4 exclusive was teased at Sony’s press briefing with a killer trailer (it looked pre-rendered, but Sony swears it was all in-game) that introduced us to a steampunk Victorian London and a band of secret heroes who might just be King Arthur’s Knights of the Round Table, still alive after all these years.

If that’s the case, they’ve seriously upgraded their armory from the Medieval days. The trailer shows off all sorts of gloriously retro-advanced technology when our heroes are attacked by barely-glimpsed monstrosities. Sony says the game is set in an alternate history, “nearly forty years after the Industrial Revolution.” And then the trailer was over as fast as it began.

The visuals and the story were enough to hook me, and the gameplay looked incredible. I want more details, and I need to know how soon Sony can shut up and take my money.

8. Why does the PS4′s controller have a touchpad?

Dozens of games were shown during Sony’s media briefing on Monday, but not a single one made use of that teeny tiny touchpad on the PlayStation 4′s DualShock controller. I’m sure someone out there will find a use for it, but so far it’s kind of like the tilt motion on the PS3′s controller — kinda cool for a handful of games, but ultimately pointless.

9. What is Media Molecule working on and why aren’t they at E3?

It’s been two long years since Media Molecule put out LittleBigPlanet 2. MM showed up to the PS4 reveal event a few months back with an impressive tech demo that involved sculpting virtual stuff in midair using the Move controller. But they’ve been tight-lipped ever since, refusing to say if that demo was part of an upcoming title or just a tech demonstration. Fans hoping that E3 might shed more light on what Media Molecule is up to will be disappointed, because they weren’t even mentioned at Sony’s presser.

10. What is Quantic Dream up to with The Dark Sorcerer?

Is it just another tech demo like Kara, or a new IP being bread-crumbed out to us a bit at a time? The demo shown this week, with its peeling-back-the-curtain twist at the end, raised a lot of eyebrows (in a good way). But what was the point? We need details, QD.

Yahoo, Microsoft, Google et al don't really offer 'free' email and it's naive to expect any form of customer service from them

A reader writes:"Dear John Naughton, As you write about the internet, I wondered if you knew how long it takes Yahoo to get back to people. I have an iPad, but went to the library to print a document (attached to an email). Yahoo knew I wasn't on my iPad and asked me to name my favourite uncle. I replied, but Yahoo didn't like my answer, so locked me out for 12 hours. I can't get into my email account. Getting to the Help page is really difficult. Do you ever speak to anybody at Yahoo? I had to open another non-Yahoo email account, so I opened a Gmail account and it looks to have the same problem. Not easy to get in touch with anybody when things go wrong. I am sure I am not the only one who wants to discuss my problem with a human being. Yours sincerely…"

Dear Reader, I hear (and sympathise with) your pain, but we need to get something straight. Yahoo email is ostensibly a "free" service (as indeed is Gmail). That doesn't mean that it costs you nothing, only that you don't pay cash up front for it. You do however "pay" in a different currency, namely your personal data. This is valuable to Yahoo because they can convert it into revenue; it enables them – and their commercial partners – to target advertisements and other marketing propositions at you and people like you.

I'm sure you realise this, really, because you must have signed up to their end user licence agreement (EULA) when you opened your Yahoo email account. You may not have read it carefully before you clicked on the "Agree" button but, buried in the knee-deep legal verbiage was a clause running something like this: "Yahoo collects, stores and uses your registration data and other information about you that are subject to the Yahoo Privacy Policy that you agreed to when you applied for and received your Yahoo Mail account." (Emphasis added.)

There's nothing unusual about Yahoo's EULA, by the way. The "agreements" required by Google, Facebook and other online companies are cast in the same mould, in the sense that they are all pathologically asymmetrical. That is to say, they require you to accept all kinds of conditions imposed by them, while explicitly exempting them from any obligations whatsoever.

Which explains why, when you go looking for what you may innocently think of as customer support, you find that no such thing exists. That's because you are not a "customer", you're merely a user. And a user, moreover, who has explicitly (if unwittingly) waived their rights to any kind of support. It also explains the adage: if the service is free, then its users are its product.

When the history of our time comes to be written, people will marvel at the way that billions of people were seduced into the kind of one-sided agreements they have struck with outfits such as Yahoo, Google, Facebook, Microsoft and Apple. In the case of Facebook, the historical analogy that comes immediately to mind is sharecropping – the agricultural system in which a landowner allowed tenants to use his land in return for a share of the crops produced on it and which was once a staple of the southern states of the US. Its virtual equivalent is the Facebook system: a billion people till Master Zuckerberg's land, creating all the content that is then harvested by him and his advertiser buddies. The only difference is that on Facebook the sharecroppers don't get any share of the proceeds. They're just croppers.

And here's the really weird bit: the croppers are absurdly pleased with their lot. They get to post photographs of themselves drunk, sober, recumbent and upside-down. They get to "Like" their friends' jokes and status updates and to organise parties and social events without having to use obsolete media such as email. And in the process they "pay" for this entertainment with their privacy and their personal data, apparently without batting an eyelid. Like I said: weird.

But back to your problem with Yahoo. Everyone who has been in your position has experienced the frustration that drove you to write. Why do these companies not provide telephone support lines with human beings at the other end? The answer is simple: call centres cost money and are only necessary if a company is compelled, by law or by competitive pressure, to support its customers. Your problem is that you're not a customer of Yahoo. Its customers are advertisers who want to exploit its network and what it knows about its users. And I bet there's a support line for them, staffed by a real human being.

So if you want an email service that provides the equivalent of a helpline, I'm afraid you'll have to pay for it. Yours sincerely, John.

The explosion of protest over the last week in Turkey began when people tried to stop the pulling down of trees in Gezi Park as part of a government plan to replace the park with yet another shopping centre that would include yet another mosque, the demolition of the secular Ataturk cultural centre and its replacement with an Ottoman-era military barracks. This was no accident of history really, because the loss of green spaces to development has been increasingly objected to by wide layers of Turks – working class and middle class. According to the OECD, 33% of Turks feel they lack access to green spaces, much more than the 12% average of OECD European countries and the highest level of dissatisfaction in the region.

But Turkish capitalism has been on the move and, as far as the ruling AK party and domestic and foreign capital is concerned, nothing must stand in its way (including trees). Turkey wants to move up the ladder of the rich club of the OECD and is still vying to join the EU by the end of decade. At the same time, the government is autocratically trying to impose an Islamic style state superstructure onto this capitalist expansion, with strict rules on alcohol, religious observance, dress and the subjugation of women, Iran-style. Up to now, the AK party has been riding high, winning election after election, enabling it to cut the former Ataturk secular military down to size and disperse the secular opposition of corrupt middle-class parties. The AK was backed in this by the huge urban poor of the cities where it had carefully built a base over a decade or more. But, of course, on obtaining unchallenged power, it has now become the tool of big business and foreign capital (despite the occasional rift over policy). The government increasingly sees itself as a regional power able and willing to intervene in the various clashes of the region: Iran. Palestine and more recently, Syria.

On the surface, it would appear that Turkish capital is moving on and up without much problem. And it is true that economic growth has accelerated in recent years while foreign investment has flooded in to exploit a labour force coming into the urban areas from the impoverished countryside – a classic emerging capitalist development. But this apparent economic success is still founded on the shaky young legs of a weak capitalism and is also weighed down by corruption, religious backwardness and scant regard for human rights and laws. Inequality of income, as measured by the gini coefficient, according to the IMF, is around 40, making it higher than the US, the most unequal of the advanced capitalist economies and the highest in emerging Europe, apart from Russia.

It’s no surprise that Turkey is ranked 154th in Reporters Without Borders’ Press Freedom Index. Not only is the country “currently the world’s biggest prison for journalists”, media bosses fire journalists because of pressure from the government. And prosperity is a relative thing and of course, not for all. More than 48% of the working-age population aged 15 to 64 has a paid job, a figure much lower than the OECD employment average of 66% and the lowest rate in the OECD. People in Turkey work 1 877 hours a year, more than the OECD average of 1 776 hours. In Turkey, however, 46% of employees work very long hours, by far the highest rate in the OECD where the average is 9%.

Around 67% of people say they are satisfied with their current housing situation, much less than the OECD average of 87% and the lowest level amongst OECD countries. On Turkey, the average home contains 0.9 rooms per person, less than the OECD average of 1.6 rooms per person and one of the lowest rates across the OECD. In terms of basic facilities, 87.3% of people in Turkey live in dwellings with private access to an indoor flushing toilet, less than the OECD average of 97.8% and the lowest rate across OECD countries.

The best-performing school systems manage to provide high-quality education to all students. In Turkey, the average difference in results, between the 20% with the highest socio-economic background and the 20% with the lowest socio-economic background is 106 points, higher than the OECD average of 99 points. This suggests the school system in Turkey mainly provides higher quality education for the better off.

Total health spending accounts for 6.1% of GDP in Turkey, more than three points below the average of 9.5% across OECD countries. At $913 in 2008, Turkey’s level of health spending per person is the lowest in the OECD, where the average is of $3268. In Turkey, only 61% of people say they are satisfied with water quality. This figure is the lowest in the OECD, where the average satisfaction level is 84%, and suggests Turkey still faces difficulties in providing good quality water to its inhabitants.

The Great Recession hit Turkish capitalism just as hard as elsewhere. The answer of the government (against IMF advice) was to let loose a huge credit boom to fuel domestic demand. This pushed the inflation rate to double digits and widened the current account deficit to 10% of GDP (the second largest in the world in dollar terms) in 2011, exposing Turkey to the risks of capital flow reversal at a time of continued global uncertainty. External financing needs are around 25% of GDP so that Turkish banks rely on short-term foreign borrowing. Turkey has jumped from an agricultural to services economy within two decades and the recession weakened the manufacturing base. Conglomerates like Eczacibasi and Zorlu have built huge shopping malls in the past few years rather than investing in their core businesses.

In the last two years, the economy slowed, driven by weakening domestic demand. Turkey remains prone to boom-bust cycles driven by foreign capital flows. The health of global imperialism is still the overriding factor in Turkey’s own growth. The national saving rate has fallen dramatically over the last 15 years, from 25% of GDP in the late 1990s to less than 15% now. This decline has been larger than in any G-20 country over this period and stands in stark contrast to the experience in peer emerging economies. So Turkey is forced into making its labour force competitive to attract more FDI flows into the tradable sector. At around 2.0% of GDP, FDI inflows are still below the G–20 EM average , with most flows tilted toward unproductive sectors such as banking and real estate.

Between 2003 and 2011, real GDP growth averaged 5.3% a year, but the unemployment rate remained in double-digits, thus creating a reserve army of labour to exploit. The deficit on trade and income with other countries was over 5% of GDP on average. But these were the good years for Turkish capitalism. Economic growth is expected to slow to less than 4% a year for the rest of this decade, at best, while the external deficit will widen to 7.5% of GDP. The boom of the last decade was partly based on real estate, credit and services and construction and less and less on manufacturing, exports and investment.

That’s because the profitability of Turkish capital has declined as the expansion of the labour force began to slow. The decline was visible during the 1990s. It was no accident that the AKP won landslide victory with the backing of big business in the 2002 elections just one year after its foundation. Under the AKP, profitability made a dramatic recovery (albeit based partly on unproductive investment). The Great Recession brought a new reversal and this time the recovery in profitability has faltered. Although profitability recovered to the previous peak by early 2010, since then it has taken a tumble and is still below the peak before the Great Recession.

The green shoots in the woods of Turkish capitalism are not so healthy that the government can continue to pull up the trees.

Western central banks have got themselves horribly wrong-footed as a result of not adjusting their anti-gold policies to allow for the realities of Asian gold demand. Though their dealings are shrouded in secrecy, there is compelling evidence that much – if not most – of Western central bank gold has been quietly sold over the last three decades.

More recently all members of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation, a common security and trading bloc led by Russia and China and incorporating the bulk of Asia’s land mass, have been accumulating gold. Between current SCO and future members (India, Iran, Afghanistan, Mongolia, Belarus and Sri Lanka), with their citizens numbering over 3 billion people, they have together cornered the global market for physical supply, without even taking account of demand from the rest of South East Asia’s gold-hungry population.

The result is that gold markets are now failing to clear. The outcome is a choice: the West will either have to stop intervening and allow gold to find a level where physical and derivative markets interact properly with each other, or capital markets in the West will face a growing crisis likely to spill over into other markets. While these outcomes were always going to be a choice to be made at some time in the future, the disconnection between physical gold and derivatives has become so great that it is now an immediate concern.

At the government level it is a geopolitical clash of the titans. Russia and China are almost certainly aware of the lack of gold in Western central bank vaults: they are fully capable of thorough due-diligence in this respect. They have so far been careful not to disrupt capital markets because it has not been in their interests to do so; however, the current hiatus in gold markets is almost certain to modify their view.

Fundamental to all this is their attitude to Western currencies: the yen is now collapsing, the euro area is in deep trouble and the US economy is at very best stagnating. Until now, payment for Russian energy and Chinese goods in foreign currencies has been welcomed, because it has allowed the Russian and Chinese elites and middle classes to accumulate wealth. This balance of interests can only be maintained for so long as Russian and Chinese governments and their citizens can hedge foreign currency risks through an offsetting accumulation of foreign-owned gold.

This is no longer the case, because to all intents and purposes western capital markets are cleaned out of physical supplies, and the ability of the Western central banks to supress gold prices appears to be ending. And with the West’s financial system no longer able to deliver their most prized commodity, hitherto passive attitudes in Asia to Western currencies are likely to be reassessed.

The gold question has become central to east-west trade. The sensible approach for Western central banks is to defuse the problems arising by taking positive steps to ensure that gold markets operate properly. This is conceptually difficult, because the most likely result, a higher gold price, would risk undermining confidence in the major currencies and most probably damage the bullion banks in London.

So Tuesday night’s big reveal of Xbox One – Microsoft’s new incarnation of their console – appears to have been a disaster of spectacular proportions. This is interesting in itself, though not totally unexpected; people often react to new things in less than positive ways. But what’s especially interesting are the things that Microsoft got wrong and the specific elements that people are finding so problematic. On Microsoft’s part, they first amount to a baffling inability to understand the actual living situations of its own market, but they also amount to the continuation of a trend that I’ve written about several times before, namely: the worrying inclination of companies and their designers to remove agency from tech owners.

The first – and again, baffling – problem about the reveal was that the new Xbox appears to have been designed for the world of ten or fifteen years ago, a pre-tablet and smartphone world where people have an entirely different relationship with their TVs. The TV is the center of what Xbox One is and does; the reveal seemed to focus just as much on new ways to watch TV shows as it did actual games that one might use it to play. In other words, Microsoft appears to be attempting to sell a game console by marketing it as something other than a game console – which is puzzling. Even more puzzling is who Microsoft appears to think their market is: People with large TVs and large living rooms (that can handle a Kinect, which is now a required component of the console; more on that in a minute) and lives that might conceivably revolve around a TV in the first place rather than a smartphone or an iPad. In a post for Gamasutra, Leigh Alexander takes particular issue with this:

[B]y the end of the console event, I sat disoriented, feeling like I’d seen one of the Big Three take a hard left into a past decade, a fictional privileged nation where everyone owns a giant television they want to talk to, where they entertain themselves with high-end fictional simulations of football season and futuristic, nebulous wars abroad. Where we supposedly want whole-body play. Where the fantasy is that all our living rooms are big enough for that.

This is a catastrophic misconception of how the lives of my generation – Millennials – tend to look and how we tend to use our technology. Maybe our parents had big living rooms and big TVs that were the centerpiece of the house; we carry around small, nimble, intensely portable devices through which we consume a growing percentage of our entertainment media. In essence, Microsoft – a tech company, by no means always bad at what they do – made it look as though they have literally no idea what the digital side of our lives looks like. Alexander again:

My parents and their Boomer friends have those theoretical American homes, the kind with the spacious sofa and the dominant television altar, where they mainly watch on-demand recordings of cable shows…I’ve got friends who love immersive worlds and epic battles, sure. They have thousands of dollars in student debt and tiny, impermanent living spaces; their generation isn’t exactly about to broadly become the next generation of home owners. We play games on consoles and we watch shows on television and we Skype and Tweet from laptops, netbooks, iPads, PCs.

I live in a basement. I’ve lived in a basement for the last four years, because I’m in graduate school and it’s what tends to be most conveniently available in my area. A Kinect is not on the table for me, even if I wanted it (I don’t). The living situation of most of my friends looks similar.

The second major – and, I’d argue, most important – thing about which gamers are up in arms is the degree to which a number of features seem to limit the control an Xbox One owner has over their own machine. First and foremost, the device will apparently require regular internet connectivity – not constant, but regular – in order to work. As usual, no one speaking in any official capacity is calling this DRM, because no one likes to officially label anything DRM, but it feels uncomfortably close to the kind of always-on feature that made SimCity such a disaster. A number of people have pointed out the practical issues with this: what about people who live in areas where broadband internet is sparse or nonexistent? What about people like members of the military stationed overseas, for whom gaming is often a valuable form of recreation?

But aside from even the practical issues, this is yet another instance of someone buying something but not really owning it – not being free to set the terms under which it’s used. It doesn’t matter to Microsoft if you want to play Call of Duty (primary selling point: now there’s a dog!) offline in single-player campaign mode. If you have no internet for any significant length of time – say, a day or more (as yet the actual timeframe is unclear) – that’s not happening. No dog for you.

Added to this, it doesn’t appear that the console will allow players to easily make use of used games, given that it won’t run games off of a disc (Microsoft is apparently working on a digital trading service). And then there’s the mandatory Kinect thing. All of these problems amount to a console that you pay for but don’t really control. Which isn’t new – I own a PS3 and I can either “choose” to install firmware updates or to be unable to play any new games – but it’s another step down the road.

But I’m actually pretty happy. Why? Because people are making a stink about this. People still care. Losing control over something they pay for is not an attractive prospect to them. As long as at least some people regard this state of affairs as unacceptable, I think there’s hope.